Monday, September 28, 2009

Mushrooms and Berries

All over Latvia in late summer and early fall, the above is a common sight: An ordinary Latvian who has gathered enough mushrooms (usually chanterelles) and berries (I think "bilberries" are the most common on the street, one of several Latvian berries that can nominally be translated into English, but your correspondent doesn't believe he's ever seen them before. Bilberries are like blueberries, but smaller and less tasty. However, Latvian strawberries are sweet and more tasty than the ones one often finds in the U.S.). The urban set-up, seen here, is somewhat less common than the folding table set up along a rural highway, which is so common one has to wonder how any of them makes any money with all the bilberry-selling competition out there.

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Guatemala? Rio de Janeiro? Huh?

This journal once chronicled the experience of a low-level American diplomat living in Guatemala. Then he went to Latvia, and Afghanistan, and then back "home" to Washington, DC for a bit. He is now serving in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. If you are one of the few people of no blood relation to the authors who has come here in search of Guatemalan content, here are a few choices from the archives that we like:

In Afghanistan, the photographic opportunities were often limited to what we could sneak with a point-and-shoot camera out the bulletproof window of a speeding SUV. But sometimes we got out and about. A few favorites from that tour:

We've also vacationed aggressively in each region we've been posted in, and taken some epic home leave trips, usually leading to better photos than those where we were posted. Those photos are included in the blog, but somehow holiday snaps seem beneath this sidebar.